Sunday, July 30, 2017

Nuclear Nutcase and Suitcase

Having had quite a long time to cogitate on these things (3
days ago I hit 86), I have seen nuclear weapons as being little more than a
means by which small nations as well as big ones could beat themselves on the
chest gorilla-style while yowling at each other without risk of having their
bluffs called.But now that too large a
proportion of the U.S.
"white" population has let sheer racial hatred get the better of them
and they have put into the Oval Office a creature much more terrifying than any
gorilla, i.e. a human gone berserk with power, all bets are off – except one.That one bet, that one hope is that the U.S.
military has long since seen the need to quietly but thoroughly disable the
button in the legendary nuclear suitcase that U.S. Presidents are thought to
have available at all times.If the
military hasn't done that by now, then they are all traitors of the worst kind,
to the U.S.,
and, even more, to the entire planet, since the planet counts for much, much
more than do the political considerations of any number of self-absorbed
nation-states.

On the other hand, however, what makes me think that the
military would act any more responsibly in this matter than would the Executive
or any other branch of the Government?Am
I hoping for a coup, or something of that nature?--Not really, though that would be
interesting.Everything that is bad news
for T. Rump is good news for this country.

Sunday, July 23, 2017

A Fine Kettle of Fish

Six months after a sizable portion of the so-called
"white" population took advantage of a grievous and badly overlooked
loophole in the American electoral system enough to enable alife-long ignoramus named T. (for
"Tweetybird") Rump to assume the formerly dignified and even revered
office of President of the United States, it's hard to believe that Rump's
admirers can be happy with the fine kettle of fish in which their boy finds
himselfboiling every hour of the day
and the night.To all intents and
purposes he is functionally illiterate, and so is able to communicate with that
semi-conscious entity, the
"American People," only by means of that literacy-killer, twitter
feeds.Equally unable to call upon the
little that remains of common decency in the Republican Party, he is forced to
fill the White House rooms and halls only with low-lifers who resemble nothing
so much as they do pockets of maddened piranhas in always bloodied Brazilian
rivers.Otherwise he spends his time riding
from place to place and inhabiting fields where the thing is to hit little
white balls into little black holes.And the only policy that he can be said to be pursuing is to reverse
everything that his much worthier predecessor in that office, B. Obama,
pursued.Rump figures that that is the
easiest thing to do to keep up his impersonation of chief executive.But finding the flaws that everything that
Rump, his grown children, and his companions in crime do are really what is
like shooting fish in a barrel, and there's never a shortage ofthose misdeeds, from one day to the
next.The MSM is happier than they want
to let on.

Sunday, July 09, 2017

Medieval Man

Today we have a situation in which a large segment of the
white population has foisted upon the rest of the United States, black, brown, red,
and white alike, a 71-year-old self-admitted grabber of women’s genitals.That segment accomplished that heinous act
by strong-arming this man into the supposedly high office of the President of
those United States.

I have given this man a name.His first name is “Tweetybird.”That applies because he is a total ignoramus
who has admitted that he has not read a book since he was in high school, and that has
left him able to communicateonly
through the use of a dubious service called “Twitter,” in which messages are
limited to a maximum of no more than 140 letters.And his last name, his surname, his family
name is “Rump,” which applies because of the bodily feature that he is most
fond of presenting to the world.Thus
his full name is “Tweetybird Rump.”

Another name would be just as fitting.It is “Tyrannosaurus Rump.”And in fact that name could be even more
apt, because it refers to the thing that hissupporters like most about him: his constant readiness to chew on and to
chew out other living beings and to fight.They will never defend him on the basis of whether or not something is
right or wrong.That means nothing to
them.Instead they sing his praises
because so far he has spent the bulk of his time in the Oval Office in fighting
– fighting back against his numerous, justified critics, since everyone, even
his supporters, know that he has absolutely no business being there.

Meanwhile the “Tyrannosaurus” also fits
because the policies that he espouses and that he flings wildly about like mud
against a water tower reveal a hunger to see the rest of the world dragged back
into the period in which he would feel the most comfortable, assuming that his
caretakers have told him about it, during their bed time stories – the medieval
Dark Ages.

Saturday, December 10, 2016

Small Consolation

Despite intense and constant search, so far in this painful
new era of the Triumph of the Nasties, I have been able to dredge up only one
area of small consolation.It involves the
image I have always seen My-Country-Tis-of-Thee as having, namely that of a
huge sea-going vessel, like one of those oil tankers, or container ships, or
aircraft carriers, or cruise ships for which no adjective denoting enormous
size and unwieldiness really does the job.

I have never had the unpleasant experience of being asked to
pilot one, but I can easily imagine that it is one hellish job to turn one of
those monsters around so as to make it turn a full 180 degrees.At least not without having miles of open
space to do so, and not without taking all year, and also not without meanwhile
colliding with everything in sight.And
I would also think that this would be especially true if the pilot was so
unqualified for the job that he wouldn’t even know when to do the fun stuff,
like sounding the foghorns, along with knowing what numbers of blasts to make
for what messages.

The Tipped-Over States of America in a Time of T. Rump

In a word, the U.S. is a country that doesn’t easily change
direction, which means that it might take a while before the toxic fall-out
from the recent election starts reaching the places where I stand now.

So does this mean it will be some time yet before 23 of
those guys in the black vans and with their shoulders and their heads bent sideways at an angle of 45 degrees come for me?The Mossad
might, soon enough.I know that by this
time Yahuboy is quite fed up with my on-the-nose observations about his actions.
But as for the T. Rump brownshirts, that
could be another question.It’s hard to
find one’s way here from there.

Absurd as this sounds, I can’t help forgetting that, years
ago, the proprietor of another weblog where I would frequently post my unacceptable
opinions, mentioned to his readers that I had just started this weblog here
(this was in 2004 or thereabouts), and by way of apparent recommendation, he
said that I was on his list of surefire candidates to be carted off soon to
Gitmo.

But just as Tennessee Williams had one of his female
characters saythat she had always
depended on the kindness of strangers, I have always depended on my ringing
insignificance as a person.And if that
kind of thing worked for Blanche in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” then total
obscurity should keep on working for me as well.

As is my practice in these kinds of things, I will just have
to go on poking in the darkness, depending on the knowledge that, often as not,
darknesses turn out to be entirely empty, even when those 23 squatheads are
actually there.

There is one other thing.

It may take time, but sooner or later, if it hasn’t sunk in
the meantime, that ocean-going monster can be set lumbering off in an opposite
and undesirable direction after all, before at length, because of the bad
charts its captain of the moment insists on using, it inevitably starts
scraping bottom, runs aground, and keels over, heaving its cargo sharply to one
side and eventually overboard.

This could be the case today, if the ship – that is, the
U.S. Government -- has been hijacked,
and by the usual, starboard-leaning
barfbags.

Thursday, December 08, 2016

Season of Marching Orders

Whenever the U.S. Presidency changes hands, it’s always
necessary and interesting to note who is getting their marching orders and in
which directions, as well as also seeing who is giving them.

Till now, when it comes to instructing new Presidents,
Israeli premiers have had a monopoly.But so far it seems to me that not as much as usual has been heard from
the Yahu guy, and instead it’s been the Trump Humper who has been busy issuing
the orders, warnings, and threats left and right, by his words and by his
choices of accomplices to accomplish the dirty work.

Or have either I or the deliberately negligent news media
failed to notice?

Perhaps B. Netanyahu has been too busy trying to figure out
how his efforts in Israel and Palestine might fit in with the new situation in
America, since Israel serves as a model for the state in which the current President-elect
would like to leave the U.S., now that suddenly and unaccountably he is slated
soon to hold the levers of power in his hot, grubby little hands.

However, we should never forget that this business actually goes
much farther back in time though not in place, for it involves the aspirations
of the slave-holding states of America
during that country’s Civil War in the 1860’s.

The state of Israel, often called “America’s 51st state,”
has obviously used as its models the twin entities, first, of the now vanished
“Nationalist Socialist” state that characterized Germany in the mid-20th
century and second, the form that the
losers of the American Civil War would have assumed in the mid-19th century if
they hadn’t been chased out of Richmond, Virginia before they could establish
the entity that they would have called “the Confederate states of America” and which
would have been located in the bottom parts of what is now again uneasily called
“the United States of America.”

It is strange how in such ways Israel has become a paradox like no
other.Yet people treat it much as they
do the Sun, as if to look directly at it would burn out their rods and cones
forever, without realizing that they are already blind.There is no other way to explain the general
failure to recognize that Israel is today the world’s leading example of a
fascist state, albeit a half-assed one and even though its citizens claim to be
the direct descendants of a large and much more distinguished group that was
almost wiped out through the use of mass shootings and gas chambers by one of
several countries that indulged in fascism all at much the same time, in the
mid-20th century.Of those,only the Germans are much remembered and
reviled for having done so, because, being by nature more thorough-going about everything
they undertake than are Italians, the Spanish, and now, we dare to hope, the
Israelis, the Germans carried the whole through to its ultimate end – including
promptly receiving their just desserts of reaping the whirlwinds.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the lot of the Palestinians,
who are suffering in the role that was once tragically borne by Jewish people
in preceding days, and by American slaves imported from Africa and by numerous
tribesmen that were already in the New World, all that is generally available
to us is hope, since in his drive to ethnically clear the West Bank of its
rightful proprietors, Netanyahu has a gigantic patron that he and his cohorts
can always implicitly depend on.This is
especially true since he has set into stone so deeply and permanently his
practice of journeying to see every newly elected U.S. President without fail,
and there to issue to that individual his marching orders, usually in the forms
of backing up all of Israel’s threats to its neighbors, militarily as well as by
voting the right way against U.N. resolutions, and, by the way, also by keeping
those big checks flowing to all those offices in what can now only be sadly
called “the Unholy Land.”

Sunday, December 04, 2016

Prezelec T. Rump, the Ultimate Outlaw

How fitting it is that one of the most unqualified and
repulsive Americans now alive should nevertheless be in the position of merely
needing to draw breath for another six or seven weeks before, amid much
mouth-breathing fanfare, he is to be shown the way to the outside steps of the
U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. and there sworn in as the next
President of the United States. It will
be fitting because of how that dreadful aberration came to be.

We are talking here about a man who has shown that he has no
more class than, as might be said in Texas, a bi-donged dog.One has only to recall how Rump spoke over
the radio of how much he has in the past enjoyed grabbing the genitals of women
that he seemed not to have known, while just a day or two ago, he went on a
“victory” tour in which he boasted to his supporters what they already knew and
had been constantly salivating over, namely that they, and he, had won it all –
the White House, the Supreme Court, and both chambers of the Congress, while
making no mention of how that left absolutely nothing in the way of fairness
and justice for the rest of Americans, which is also the majority of them.

This gargantuan and completely twisted tragedy of
happenstance was only made possible by the use, even up to this supposedly far
advanced day, of a method of choosing Presidents that was imposed on this
country out of a need to assuage the states that practiced slavery by allowing
them to count each male slave – who of course was never allowed to vote,
because he was not considered to be a real human but instead was always to be
seen as just a mere beast of burden – as three-fifths of a person nevertheless
among the inhabitants of his “owner’s” plantation, household, or whatever.

Of course one would rarely if ever hear this process spoken
of this way in most explanations of the Electoral College.Instead the College is euphemistically
presented as a fair-minded way to keep the states with less population from
being consistently overwhelmed in the count by the larger states.Instead now we have the situation where six
or seven citizens in one of today’s larger states, especially California,
consistently find that their votes taken together equal little more than one vote
of a citizen in one of the smaller states, like Wyoming, and that leads to
elections as perverse as the one we have just now suffered, in which a person
can get two million more votes than anyone else and still see the second-place
finisher declared the winner instead.

As if that enormous distortion of the political process
(which has not been adopted by any other country on the planet) was not bad
enough, I keep wondering why so many people thought that this one particular person
rated getting their votes, period, because during the campaign, T. Rump was
clearly revealed as a man who has always operated on the sleazy side of the
street, and so will beyond all doubt continue to deport himself in exactly the
same way in this highest office that, by a thousand orders of unaccountability,
he is to be allowed to occupy.If one
thinks that for some weird reasons he has been allowed to get away with more
than enough bad behavior already, the words “You ain’t seen nothing yet!” take
on new meaning.

He is involved in not just a few but many hundreds of lawsuits, since his favorite
sport is suing people, and it looks as if more than a few brave souls havesued him in turn.

Though thought of by the unthinking as being a good
businessman, this man lost 816 billion dollars in one year.Yet he is thought to have arranged to take
advantage of that and robbed the Government by taking advantage of a loophole
to avoid paying income taxes anymore for as many as 18 years.Along the way he also incurred six bankruptcies.

He impressed the highly impressionable by calling himself a
billionaire.Yet, unlike all other
Presidential candidates for the last 40 (forty!) years, he never allowed today’s
American public to see his tax records and so determine if he was really that
successful, or whether in reality his business record is just a long collection
of various scams, along the lines of the Trump University dodge that he settled
just days ago by shelling out $25,000 .And he is still being allowed to get away with that withholding of vital
tax information.Why?

And now, even before he assumes office, he is setting up
three of his children and a son-in-law to take part in what promises to be a nepotism
ring operating from the White House, and it is easy to expect that through
these covetous kids, this man will pay much more attention to his bottom lines
than he will to the national budget or to the many national and international
issues, of which he will have little to no understanding anyway (a good thing,
too, in light of all those bankruptcies) and instead will leave those
“extraneous” matters to the many other equally unscrupulous members of his mob
that he is sloppily staffing, and these henchfolk will likewise be scrambling
to benefit themselves and their kind instead of responding fairly and justly to
the many pressing needs that others will try to bring to their warped
attentions, in vain.

What, then, about the stuff that I already mentioned briefly
but that should’ve sunk this guy’s candidacy without a bubble?It involved his repeated sexual misdeeds of
several kinds that were brought to light during the campaign.Yet, in spite of all that, this man was
chosen.

He has been married three times and always to women much
younger than he and who all looked like former contestants in one of those
beauty pageants that he liked to sponsor because of the opportunities they
offered for some serious backstage leering?Why isn’t his fidelity marked by his possession of a wife who is close
to his own age and that he has been married to for a long time?Why does his latest wife, an immigrant, usually
just stand there tethered to his haunch while wearing a stony expression that
clearly asks, “What is this?Elephant
plops?”

What happened to “family values,” that purple drum that
Republiklans usually beat so furiously?Why did so many people instead condemn his longtime married (and then
only once) lady opponent because she stood by her man when he was copiously accused
of yielding to temptations logically brought on and, even more bitterly also
because of her choice of email server?Her email server, for God’s sake!!How did a person’s email server come to be ranked so highly among the Seven
Deadly Sins?

These questions, rarely asked during the campaign, were and
still are are never given any answers that make the slightest bit of sense.Why?

An old-timer, who helped us greatly when we city-slickers
moved down here into the Virginia
sticks and who through that period was younger than I am now, was fond of
putting the clincher on his contentions by saying, “I’m not telling you what I
believe.I’m telling you what I know.”And here I will follow suit.

There is only one explanation.

“Tonsils” Rump has been welcomed and boosted into power
because those who all their lives have yearned to get away with the same kinds
of crimes and garbage and more – up to and including mass ethnic cleansing, a
la the current Israeli treatment of the Palestinians – see in him the perfect
vehicle in which they can happily ride to the fulfillment of all their own
highly immoral and base desires.

That includes the Devout – you
know, the souls who will ride to Rump’s inauguration on that awful, upcoming
January 20th, with, to update Mark Twain’s words of a century or two ago, “the
calm, clear self-satisfaction of a Christian holding four aces.”

Thursday, December 01, 2016

The Golden Door No More

Smack (or, I suppose, almost so) in the middle of New York
Harbor is a tiny island that contains not much more than a fort of the 1800’s
built in the form of an 11-pointed star and serving purely as an elevated
platform on which stands a truly enormous, light green statue that can be seen
for miles, geographically speaking, and in fact all over the world, spiritually
speaking.The name given to this statue
by its makers is “Liberty Enlightens the World,” though in the U.S.
it is somewhat less elegantly known as “The Statue of Liberty.”

This statue was not “made in America.”Instead it was the result of three Frenchmen
putting together their heads and their talents and quickly, efficiently, and
successfully carrying through an idea from its inception to its very tangible
and meritorious end -- though they would have good reason to be appalled at the
physical and moral surroundings in which their conception in its concrete
(though I should say “metallic”) form now languishes, 150 years later.

A historian named Eduoard de Laboulaye got the notion that
what the world needed was a monument to liberty.He passed his idea on to his friend, an
artist named Frederic A. Bartholdi, who then came up with the design and also
put his shoulder to the wheel in finding funds for the project.Meanwhile one of their illustrious
contemporaries in Paris, the builder of the Eiffel Tower,
Alexandre G. Eiffel, put together the inner iron framework that supports, among
other things, the 331 sheets of copper that, patinaed by the elements, comprise
the outside parts of the statue and give it that interesting color of an apple
not yet beginning to turn red.

As an aside -- funny thing about the Eiffel Tower.

It would be mainly art students who would know that though
the Eiffel Tower has meant Paris through and through for quite a long time, the
Impressionists and the other now world-famous painters of the 1880’s and
thereabouts were not exactly thrilled when that incredibly tall, ugly, inhuman,
iron thing rose up smack in the middle of beautiful, thoroughly human Paris and
overshadowed everything else around, and they generally avoided giving that
unwelcome intruder any place in their paintings, even though they were as busy
as could be recording the slightest glints on oranges, apples, and every other
visual subtlety that offered itself.

But when it came to Bartholdi’s statue of that woman holding
high her torch, things were different, mainly because as soon as all the parts
were fabricated, those were packed into 341 boxes and shipped off in a boat to
the U.S. as a gift, at a cost of $250,000 to the French people for the statue
itself, and another $280,000 paid by Americans for the Fort Wood pedestal in
the harbor.

The French, however, did keep a model of the statue that
sits on a bridge over the Seine River in Paris – provided that it is still
there at all, and also if the French, a sensitive bunch, have by now let slide
the numerous, stupid insults that they had to endure from some Americans for
not taking part in the 2003 travesty of invading Iraq, which was a blunder of
gigantic proportions that, with the just concluded election, now has every
chance to be repeated, in various forms, since the new U.S. President-to-be was
voted in by the same numbskulls who so roundly condemned France for acting so
intelligently 13 years ago.

Let’s face it.The
French are more evolved than not
only Americans, but also the Irish, the Germans, the Russians, and the Spanish,
or at least the French are somewhat so, and it’s possible that in 2003 they
showed that, unlike their friends and neighbors, they had learned from the many
mistakes they had made in Vietnam not that long before – blunders that a long
string of American presidents repeated in the same damn place, and that GW Bush
was blithely about to repeat in Iraq, with the same inevitable results.Meanwhile let’s not do more than merely
mention the especially dense British, who over the course of 200 years have had
their behinds unmercifully beaten and kicked out of Afghanistan by the locals a
number of times, yet every time the Americans say, “Let’s have another go at
those Pashtun ragamuffins, the British are always right there, saying,
“Righto!”And again, always ending up
with nothing but blood and misery to show for it.

That remarkable feat of engineering, the wonderful French
gift, “Liberty Enlightening the World,” was unveiled in America in 1886 when
Grover Cleveland was President, and 16 years later, in 1903, the statue was
graced with the words that come to mind with any mention of it and give the
statue its meaning, in the form of a poem written by a lady named Emma Lazarus
and titled “The New Colossus.”

The best known lines of this poem occur toward its end, and
they go as follows:

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied
pomp!” cries she

With silent
lips.“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled
masses yearning to breathe free.

The wretched
refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the
homeless, tempest-lost to me.

I lift my lamp
beside the golden door!”

Sheer distaste has kept me from looking to see how tall that
multi-storied rats nest, the T. Rump Tower, is, and so I just assume that the
statue in the harbor cannot be seen from there.

In any case that big green statue in New York Harbor must be
an intense embarrassment for the incoming T.Rump administration, so foreign is that
concept of three Frenchmen as to what “liberty” means to the intentions of
those who are about to take power in the U.S. these days.After all the Rumpisants campaigned on
principles that are exactly opposite to those espoused by men who remembered
how their country had gotten rid of absolute monarchs a century earlier, and at
about the same time that the U.S. was founded, supposedly on much the same
principles, though not actually, since the so-called “Founding Fathers” did not
really believe that “all men are created equal,’’ and especially that their
slaves were real people, and so they were quite satisfied to let human slavery
remain a law of the land for the next 80-some years.

What, then, will the Rumpisants want to do with a statue
that is there in New York Harbor for only one purpose and that is to praise
immigration, when the statue is on a concrete island that is now named
Immigrant Island, and when their man in the Oval Office has proposed making
registries of immigrants who are already here and building walls a la the
Warsaw ghettoes to prevent other possible immigrants from coming here, both of
these being measures used by the German Nazis against Jewish people?

Will they behave as if ‘”Liberty Enlightens the World” no
longer exists?Will they cover that
statue over with a blood red tarp, for the duration?Will they yearn to disassemble it and ship it
back to the French, along with a bill for the cost of that operation, while
planning to replace that statue with one of Pitchfork Ben Tillman or Theodore
Bilbo?Will they look around for a
buyer, perhaps V. Putin, or, more likely, that model premier who now presides
over another country that is now, bizarrely and inexplicably, well on its way
to becoming a full-fledged fascist nation, B.Netanyahu?

My guess is that the “Statue of Liberty” is fated to become
an example of the far right philosophy that up is down and down is up and
north is south and east is west and west is east that has so far served so well
for Rumpisants in perverting all notions and realities of long-standing truths,
and thatin their eyes the word
“liberty” will only mean the liberty to prevent men and women who are not
“white” from even thinking about what Ms Lazarus had in mind when she wrote
those immortal lines.

Whoever thought of putting “Liberty Enlightening the World”
on such a small island really knew what they were doing.At least, barring the use of a thousand
barges, that location prevents T.Rump supporters from staging massive 1934
Nuremberg-type rallies there, a la Leni Riefenstahl’swell-made though still tedious film, “Triumph
of the Will,”when that criminal section
of the “white” population gets to the point of seriously exploring the
possibilities of giving themselves the liberty to bring back slavery and so
make “their” country great again.

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

T. Rump's Dilemmas

With no teenage beauty pageants in progress right now, or
allowed anywhere near him, I wonder whatT. Rump is doing to keep his life juices flowing right now. given the
trouble they’ve always had in reaching his head? (The “T” is short for
“Tweetybird” or perhaps “Tonsils,” going by the extremely pronounced ski slope
for the bugs that extends from his chin down to the top of his chest and
thereby completely hides the color of his neck, at least from the front, though
that is easy enough to guess.)

“A man is only as good as his team.”How many billions of times has that been
said?But if that is so, then Rump is in
deep doodoo, as any man, or woman would be, if they had only a bottomless pool
of nasties to choose from.So far, of
the 15 cabinet posts, he has settled on the holders of only three, none of whom
figures to be remembered kindly in history books written by anyone other than
the endlessly hateful David Horowitz.

It’s interesting to note who, so far, has NOT been
chosen.Not one of his 15 or so adversaries during the
primaries has been picked or even mentioned as being in the running.

I guess that is because they had the temerity to go up
against him.But aren’t they a big part
of the Republican Establishment?And didn’t
he run under the Republican banner and at times used their resources?

This means that, just as in the final stages of the campaign
when he, a congenital cheapskate, withheld funds from them, so far he has kept the Republicans from
sharing the power as well, very likely out of his certainty that he won all by
himself.

But then what about the Republican Senate and House and the solidly
Republican Supreme Court that he now intends to hang around the country’s neck
before squeezing slowly, garrote style?

If then T. Rump has in mind dumping the Republicans, too,
then does he belong to any party at all, or does he intend to put into place an
all-powerful new one, called The National Socialist American Workers' Party or
some variation thereof, beginning with dropping the “Socialist” bit?Actually, however, if he wants to stay close
to his inspiration, he could keep that word in, too, without the Rumpisants
being any the wiser, so deeply have they drunk of his Kickapoo Joy Juice – until they start noticing his
friends, the Billionaire Buzzards, constantly circling overhead, though by then
it will be too late, just as it was for the Germans, the Russians, the Poles,
the Jews, and many others, during my lifetime.

Along those lines, however, it is important to note that, in
spite of all my warnings, Rudolph Guiliani, the Rednecked Paindear, is still in the running for the post that
H. Clinton once held, Secretary of State, and if anything his hopes have been
boosted by people like Rump’s campaign chief and now a senior adviser of his
transition team, K. Conway, on the basis of his loyalty, and I have to believe
that that is not to Rump’s pleasure.I
suspect that to him Giuliani has too much of the odor of the Mob, and T.R.
probably has had too many dealings with them, by having been in the casino
racket.Rump could be also recalling
what a former president with the initials “LBJ” said, something about urinating
in tents.

Another gal should be chosen.Even S. Palin would be better, though she is
being ignored, in favor of a former general who was discredited after he let
his main squeeze see classified material.Palin is always good for laughs, and that ever-present smile can be
disarming, which is what the State Department is supposed to be all about.The State Department is the Peace Department,
and the general would fit better in the Defense Department, which in my day was
called the “War Department,” and that is still the much more apt name for that
outfit.

Sunday, November 27, 2016

Snapshots in the Darkness

The Usual Sanctimonious among us, who pride themselves on
being so broad-minded and reasonable and fair, are busily braying, “Give the
President-Elect a chance for God’s sake, why don’tcha?”

My answer to that is, “A chance for what?To screw everybody in the country that is not
white?”

He was given well over a year to show that he has good
intentions.That period was called the
“Electoral Campaign.”

During that time he never revealed that he had even one
decent bone in his body.And he still
hasn’t, weeks now after the voting.For
example, look at the thugs that he has gathered around him.Uniform disasters!Yet fools persist in denying that 1934’s Germany
is already upon us.

. . . . .

During the recently concluded election campaign, when it
seemed that H. Clinton, the Lady, had the biggest chance of winning, while he,
the Lout, would lose, D. J. Trump repeatedly condemned the upcoming vote by
saying that the outcome would be rigged.

D.J.T. did in fact lose.Ms Clinton received 2,000,000 (two million) more votes than did
D.J.Yet, due to the use of an extremely
rigged system called the Electoral College, which has its roots in slavery, and
wherein the votes of some states are considered to have more value than those
of other states, the U.S.A. has now been placed under the incredible indignity
of being presided over by a confirmed bigot and lecher, among many other
shortcomings.

Isn’t it interesting, though not in the least unexpected,
that having him unjustly decreed to be the Prez has suddenly cut off all
statements by this guy and his supporters that the election was rigged, as it
so clearly was, especially when one recalls that the U.S. is the only country
in the world in which the person who gets the most votes can be declared the
loser, as has happened this year, and not for the first time, in a contemporary
teenager’s lifetime no less!

………..

As soon as Der Fuhrer DJT was elected, I started waiting to
see what sort of a plum he would drop into the eager mouth of R. Guiliani, perhaps
the most venomous of all DJT’s numerous flacks during the campaign.Now it’s been several weeks, and still
nothing has been announced.

Instead we’ve been treated to the very unbecoming spectacle
of Guiliani trying to sell himself, first as being a very good prospect for
Attorney-General, and now, since that post was filled with a throwback to the
arch-segregationists of the 1950's, he has switched to advertising himself as being the best
material of all the likelies for Secretary of State, mainly by speaking of how
often he has been overseas, serving as a consultant to a decidedly motley crew
who wanted to be elected to various posts in their countries.

But somehow that quality called “diplomacy” hasn’t shown
itself yet, in Giuliani’s self-boosting or in his lifetime behavior.Instead, from everything I’ve seen of him
over the years, I would call him “topline abrasive,” to the point that he even
physically resembles a slightly used sheet of sandpaper, coarse grade, and I
believe that the pre-Trump Republican Party also saw him that way, the reason
that they didn’t support him for any top national posts, despite his exclusive
ownership of 9/11.

So what will they do with him, and with Sarah Palin, and for
that matter, even with Michelle Bachman?Because Guiliani will surely stay loud enough that he won’t be
forgotten.

Trump’s Big Tent is going to be a gathering of Infernals if
there ever was one.For the protection
of the rest of D.C., the Oval Office is going to have to requisition bars
for its windows, Supermax grade.

Friday, November 25, 2016

Another Unsent Comment

(This time meant for a recent
diary in Daily Kos, but not sent because of how diaries there tend, after just
a few hours in sight, to be dropped into sinkholes in which they appear to be
lost forever.Better to leave it for an
archive here, whether or not it is ever again read by anyone but me.Allow me to keep thinking that one day
posterity might glance my way, if only for an instant.Smile!)

Whenever I read the comments that follow a diary like this,
I become troubled, because those comments show that a lot of supposed
progressives are no friends of the Democrats and that in fact they may be even
worst enemies of Democrats than are the Republicans (unless, of course, those
seeming Progressives are really trolls sent here by the dozens by the
Republicans to infest this site.

I first noticed this pattern taking shape as far back as the
first days following Obama’s win in 2008, not so much in Daily Kos as it was in
Common Dreams -- provided that Daily Kos existed then.I don’t know whether it did or not, but the
pattern is certainly there now, and it has gotten so bad that I am sure that even
if Hillary Clinton had won the College as well, she would still be under heavy
progressive fire that would almost match that of the Fascists, simply because
she may not have stressed an issue or two that was most vital to them.

I go back a long way, to the time when Democrats were
Democrats (when they were not Dixiecrats) and so were Progressives, instead of
being the closet Republicans that too many Progressives appear to be today.

As far as I can see there isn’t enough time to build up a
Progressive voice strong enough to replace the Democratic Voice, and in fact
very likely there aren’t enough real Progressives in existence, period.That is shown by a lot of the comments here
and in many other places as well, and it doesn’t help anything to constantly
pillory the Democrats just to show how clever and even-handed and sophisticated
one is, when all they are doing is serving the purposes of the Republifacists.

It’s simple.Republicans, not Democrats, and certainly not
the Clintons, are the enemies, and the burning magnifying glass should be
focused on them.No matter what one
might fashionably find to taser them, it is the Democrats, not Ralph Nader or
Jill Stein, that are still the last best hope before creeping Fascism finally takes
hold.

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Taking This Country Back

Long before the current President-Elect came on the scene,
Republicans habitually rallied to the dog whistle cry that, on its surface,
expresses desire to “take their country back.”And after that King of Bankruptcies did arrive and stated his intentions
to run, bothersome as that slight inconvenience promised to be to him, I would
have thought that by then that slogan would have gotten so stale that he would
not have thought of resorting to it.

But those who flocked to his rallies as if bullpoop had
never been identified and classified must never have heard that enjoinder, or,
if they had, had not heard it repeated over and over again, ad infinitum and
also ad nauseum.Consequently those
words became the leading slogan of his campaign and were emblazoned on red
baseball caps and other screaming mimies galore.

“Let’s take our country back.”

To me the operative word there is “back,” though most others
would choose the word “our” and its reference to the U.S. as being theirs and theirs
alone, when in fact, while it may have been their place of residence, it was and still is far from being theirs
alone.

The word “back,” as used in that slogan, could suggest two
things.One is that they are saying that
the U.S.
was once theirs but now it no longer is their country, which naturally means
that they should leave.Or the thinking,
if any, is that they want to guide the country back to some former state of
being or to some condition that is not at all to be desired, that is, to a state
of backwardness.

That first usage immediately causes one to ask, “Take the
country back from whom?Who now has the U.S. in their
possession?”

Obviously the reference must have been to undesirables who, for
starters, didn’t look like these ball fans or go to the right churches on Sunday.

That intimation that the country had somehow slipped into the
hands of“tawny” and “black” others made
no sense, because it was easily and totally refuted by a single, very short
admonition.“Look around.”

By that I meant that merely glancing at photos of gatherings
of those who occupied the halls of power in the U.S. prior to the recent elections
would have revealed which group had the most hands on the levers and had never
been pushed elsewhere.The nation had
not been taken at all, simply because it could not have been taken under the
circumstances that prevailed in that period.

But now, after that election, things are very different,
and, going by how some highly repellent forces are busy slithering into near
total control of the U.S. government, it is quite true to say that the nation is
in the process of being taken over, though not by Muslims, Mexicans, and
others, but by the nitwits and the bigots in the baseball caps and their
apologists.

As to where these people want to return this country and
trump-dump it there, it’s hard to guess what’s going to happen, because those
locations are too well-known, and mass human deportations and/or extinctions
are too messy and also don’t figure to smell good.In addition, hardly anyone wants to go back to
any periods when I-phones did not exist.No one. That is because,
ironically, instant evolution is already at work, and the drive toward
simplifying us into one race and one only of crook-necked and eternally
downward-staring catatonics is much too strong.

Sunday, November 20, 2016

How Close to Death Are We?

The next time it is close to the end of the month of July,
and if I am still around, I will be 86, and so I suppose I am expected to think
that, in my own case, that is an interesting question.And I am interested.Maybe even very interested.Not, however, interested enough to want to
know the answer.I don’t know why
anyone would ever want to know ahead of time the exact date of their departures.

I started thinking about this not so much in connection with
what will happen with me as it was in reaction to the latest comments I’ve been
reading on progressive sites in the Internet about the ages of the Supreme
Court Justices.It seems that of the
four oldest, two, Ginsburg and Breyer, are liberals, and both are younger than me, though not by
much.

These commenters like to ask uneasy questions and to make
uncomfortable speculations, such as that in four years, when the next
Presidential elections roll around, the chances are good that by that time at least two of
those four oldest justices will be gone and, in addition to having successfully evaded honoring Obama's choice for Scalia's replacement, the current president-elect
will have also replaced those latter two retired or deceased justices with hard-ass conservative types, and thus will have already made life difficult for a huge number of American citizens who deserved much better, for a long while to come.

Besides the political implications there, the way that that prognostication
reflects on my own personal situation throws an extra chill into me, though not
for long, because I don’t feel particularly close to death, and therefore I
don’t think the chances for those two or even just one of the older liberal justices to skate out of here in four
years are that good either, if what my person tells me is any indication, and
unless these justices already have threatening health conditions that I don’t
know about.

I think I have very good prospects for putting in another
five years at least, or until age 90.This is because generally I feel all right, and I’m not aware of having any
conditions that ordinarily take out senior citizens, even those much younger than me,
though I know perfectly well that something final could hit me at any moment and
I would never know that it had happened.I have long since been told that I have heart murmurs, but the doctor
didn’t consider those serious enough to do anything about it right then.Also occasionally -- though I haven’t told
anyone about it till now, dear reader, because I believe it’s been going on all
my life -- every once in a while I experience a sudden jolt to my nervous
system, as if I’ve been hit with 200 volts briefly.But like the murmurs, that has been happening
for far too long to me to see it as an indicator of more serious matters.

Meanwhile every once in a while a friend will say that,
because I do so little harmful stuff and therefore generally still look okay,
they see no reason why I shouldn’t, in fact, hit age 100.But I am not comfortable with that idea,
because I don’t want to need any assistance when it comes to walking
around.I don’t want to need any
assistance, period.

Yet, at the very same time I would very much like not only
to hit 100, but also to go much farther and reach age 115, which seems to be as
long as anyone lives these days, so that, should you get to be that age and
are declared to be the world’s oldest living human, that news would be enough
to bump off a person right there, because it would mean that he or she only has
at best a few more weeks before he or she is no more and is quickly replaced in
being so distinguished by the next oldest.

--No, I would like to live that long only because I have
always been fascinated by the answers that the extremely aged give to eager young
reporters who like to ask them what enabled them to grow that old, because I suspect
that few if any of those respondents really know.The factors are too numerous.

Therefore, as an intellectual exercise seasoned with a touch
of mischief, I have spent more time than I should, thinking up the answer that I would give,
should I be in a position to be so asked, though my reply, too, wouldn’t be
actually an answer, because as to why I was still hanging in there, I wouldn’t be any better informed
than anyone else.

In light of what I’ve just mentioned about life expectancy after
being designated the “world’s oldest living person,” the most appropriate
response upon hearing about that development would be to recoil in feigned horror and to
strike one’s self in the head while exclaiming, “I am? Really?The Oldest Living?” OHHHH shit!”And saying that not with pride but instead with alarm in my tone.I have even practiced using that tone.

I have not made a career out of using bad words, but I would
get a big kick out of saying just that, to some
fresh-faced female 20-year old with a pen in her hand. It would be almost worth living that long in a world that otherwise has had far too many truly appalling moments, even though the luck of timing and of geography may have allowed me to avoid a large number of the very worst.

Saturday, November 19, 2016

First Head-to-Head, or Full and Frank Discussions

There are many reasons why during the campaign I thought,
and still think, that there is no way the man who is, incredibly, now theU.S. President-elect nevertheless, could ever
do any sort of a good job as the head of the nation.One of the chief of those reasons is the
certainty that he can’t possibly cut a good figure in representing this country
when it comes to foreign relations.This
is in spite of the fact that the world stage is far from filled with impressive
figures.Even in that light he would be
like a very large and restless pit bull,
on which all the others would keep casting a wary eye, for obvious reasons.

For one thing, this Beloved of the Angries is not fluent
even in his own language, and that reflects badly on a person’s thought
processes.For another, if he ever got a
good education, that has, to my notice, never been mentioned even by his most
rabid boosters.Or if he did have one,
he long ago left it lying limpid by the wayside, like a used condom, so that
everything he says gives the strong impression that he is merely winging it –
his ideas, his values, his opinions, his policies, his convictions, everything
– and that he has never given deep thought to anything in his life, save for
doing whatever would allow him to give close-up inspections to beauty pageant
contestants, who would otherwise favor him with hardly a glance, especially now
that he is an old and badly decayed rascal, with his most notable physical
features being weak-looking eyes and all the space between his chin and the top
of his chest having a curiously webbed appearance.

I expect, therefore, that when he meets other so-called
“world leaders,” especially when there are a bunch of them together, they will
see him as being the embodiment of the famous “Ugly American” – huge, gross,
indulgent, self-absorbed, and unthinking -- and they will smile, with all kinds
of condescension in their faces and in their manners.

--Except for one guy.

There is one other figure who is his soul-mate among
national leaders, and like him, has only recently wriggled into view, and I am
waiting with interest to see if my prophesy will come true, which is that this
person will be the first “world leader” who will have a private tete-a-tete
with the current U.S. Prez-elect.And
surprise!He will not be the widely
expected Putin guy in Russia.It will instead be the recently elected
President of the Philippines,
who goes by the name of Rodrigo “Digong” Duterte and who has already established
himself as being an individual with homicidal leanings and an enormous
potty-mouth.One report has it that he
shot a fellow student while in law school, without, however, actually killing
him, while others have him being strongly supportive of the murders of as many as
1,400 criminals and drug dealers without the due process of law.In addition, while campaigning for
President, he is supposed to have vowed to see to the killing of tens of
thousands more of such people, after which he would officially pardon himself when
his term is over.

Our President-elect will not have to worry about being
subjected to the verbal abuse that Obama tolerated from this man, for various
nebulous causes. Duterte claims to have
undergone a religious conversion that has inspired him to clean up his verbal
act.That cannot be believed. Habitual cursing is a true addiction not
easily dumped, because it is so easily practiced

In any case on the heels of calling Obama obscene names for
whatever the U.S. president said or did, which couldn’t have been much, Duterte
then went on to show his true colors again, by allowing a hero’s re-burial of
what remains of Ferdinand Marcos, the notorious Dictator of the Philippines 30
years ago. I wouldn’t be surprised if
today, outside those islands, Marcos is remembered for only one thing, and it
does not even involve him and instead concerns his wife, Ymelda, a shameless
but interesting woman, who used the spousal loot mainly to accumulate an
incredibly large collection of shoes.I
always wondered what was going on there, as it struck me as being a supreme
example of enormous waste enabled by monies obtained by questionable means.What was she trying to say there?

It will be interesting to see what tune these two men will sing
together, during their first meeting in wherever and whenever, with the
likeliest spot being hopefully a leaking raft on the South China Sea.I think they will make a striking pair.Having just entered their ‘70’s, they were
born at nearly the same time, and they have nearly identical and impeccable
credentials for being classic “dirty old men.”

I can hear Duterte going right down the American President’s
alley, by telling him about one of his exploits when he was the mayor of the
city of Davao, and he had had occasion to view the remains of a woman who had
been gang-raped and then murdered.He
was struck by how beautiful the woman had been, and Duterte said she looked so
much like an American film star that he had asked why he couldn’t have been the
first in line to rape her, since he was the mayor.When an outcry arose he defended himself by
saying he had only meant that as a joke -- that old excuse for bad behavior
that is apparently as dismally weak in the Philippines
as it is in the U.S.

I couldn’t see that that excursion into outright necrophilia
was much different from speaking of fondness for grabbing women by that
all-important and sensitive part of their physical equipment, their genitals,
as that U.S. President had testified to having, in his confabs over the radio with
his buddy, Howard Stern, and there was a tape tape to prove it.So he and Duterte are sure to get along
famously, especially in view of Republican support for rape, as shown by
statements by one or the other of their candidates every once in a while and
their arguments against abortion.

President Dump and President Dirt. That’s a picture.The Bad and the Ugly, with nothing Good
anywhere to be seen.

Friday, November 18, 2016

Gardner's 2nd Law

(Below is a statement that I
submitted yesterday, to Professor Juan Cole’s site, Informed Comment,
and it was accepted and published.It is
a comment to an article he wrote, titled Neofascist Trump Appointee Bannon: “Anger is
a Good thing” “if you’re Fighting to Take this Country Back”)I
regret my failure to add that I also had in mind the anger that wasa major part of how the President-elect’s
biggest fans were always designated.)

In reference to the title of
this informative article, I long ago decided that Gardner’s 2nd Law is the truth of the matter
and that anger is in fact as bad as evil gets.That Law states that “Anger is one of the very worst traits of Homo
Sapiens.One should never do or say
anything while he or she is angry, because otherwise they will find themselves
indulging in acts so stupid and uncalled-for that, if the perpetrators have
even just a glimmer of conscience, later they will deeply regret what they’ve
done.That will happen every time.”

I have had a lot of time to
see how often that holds true, in myself and in others, and I haven’t seen much
of anything that would refute that Law.Deny it, yes, and that’s only to be expected.But never to refute it.

And so, what sort of a future
can this country have, since we are faced with an administration riding in
roughshod over all common decency, especially as that relates to women and
minorities,and bearing at the sharpest
point of its hell-bent prow a “strategist” who just loves rage and anger and
has absolutely nothing else to offer but the destruction of all worthwhile things,
such as the freedom to vote without fear of being harassed, or giving everyone equal
opportunity regardless of their melanin count?

Thursday, November 17, 2016

High Places in America

Beginning with coming into my parents’ lives, in my first
years I was woefully late for everything important.Now, in my concluding years, I am hoping
that the same fortunate tardiness will continue, and without too much pain and suffering.So far it has, save for events that take
place far away, geographically speaking, such as the recent elections.

Consequently, it wasn’t till I got into my 30’s – which
almost exactly coincided with the 1960’s, the most important and far-reaching
decade in recent American history so far, though young conservatives will
bitterly and stupidly reject that opinion -- that I stopped being so much of a
retard in all matters, especially socially.Lagging behind my contemporaries by 10 years, I finally did such things
as easing into some sort of a sex life, learning to drive a car, getting
married, buying a house of my own, getting real jobs, publishing two books
(plus also writing a number of others that I think are much better yet are
still unpublished), fathering a son, and in general settling down with a fair
idea of what I wanted to do through the rest of my life.

That included going to Japan in 1966 with my new wife on a
sort of extended honeymoon while we spent the summer leisurely traveling through
that country, which I already knew quite a lot about, as I had been there twice
before, first at the behest of Uncle Sam, and later because of getting a
college fellowship.

During that ’66 swing, one afternoon we were looking at the
walls of the Imperial Palace in Kyoto when a
young Japanese guy, eager to take another shot at improving his English,
engaged us in earnest conversation – an event that was frequently a part of traveling
through Japan.Everything was proceeding on the normal
course of topics of no particular importance, when he suddenly hit us with an
unexpected question that hit me in my mind like a ton of bricks.He asked what we thought of the American
involvement in Vietnam.

I was intensely
embarrassed, because I didn’t want to admit that, though I prided myself on
being a good and even reasonably informed American, I thought exactly nothing about the American
involvement in Vietnam, and the truth was, in startling contrast to the way
that I am today, I had paid almost zero attention to things in Vietnam, though
by 1966 that situation had already been going on for the better part of two
decades.

I had heard mentions of Vietnam now and then, and I vaguely
knew that some sort of a contest was going on there, but to me it was little
more than a sporting event that we Americans could expect to win at some time
in the future, and that was all.And
unfortunately by that time I had long since lost the interest that I had had in
my more juvenile days in all such things as basketball, baseball, and football
games.I had decided, and rightfully so,
that, especially because I had never participated and would never do so in
those kinds of events, they were of no consequence whatsoever and therefore not
worth following, and it was in that discarded bracket that Vietnam had
alwaysexisted, slumped, in my mind.

If I had known, I might have been made more comfortable by
the fact that very few other Americans would have been able to give any kind of
a sensible answer to that question either, because, as Barbara W. Tuchman tells
us in her great book, “The March of Folly,” the details of that American
involvement in Southeast Asia had been kept largely a secret from the American
public.Yet, here was a young guy who
was neither American nor Vietnamese, yet was interested enough in that issue to
ask what we thought of the things our leaders were doing – or not doing – in Vietnam.

Now, 50 years farther on, all of a sudden, though I had
preferred reading about how the British lost America,
I am reading Tuchman’s chapters on Vietnam with great interest and
excitement, just as if it is a thriller and even because I know exactly how
that story is going to turn out.That is
because I still remember precisely what I was doing in that same period, down to
the exact year, and year by year.And
that, in turn, is because, by chance, at that very same time I was heavily involved
in very different and of course far, far less sweeping (though in the end much
more successful) events that took place just a few city blocks in D.C. from the
marble edifices in which the likes of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and
Johnson, plus all their world-famous generals and experts, were busy ignoring
dozens of “fact-finding missions” that ended up advising the power structure to
get the hell out of Vietnam while they could and without losing too much face.Yet they in all their keen perceptions and wisdom
(and fears of the American public) kept making decisions as if World War 2 was
still going on and Vietnam
was merely the last island that had to be landed upon with the Marines, a la
Saipan and Okinawa, and delivered into
freedom, only from Communism and not the Japanese.

Today I have more reason than ever to keep paying close
attention to what people are doing in their marble palaces and offices here and
overseas, because the latest occupants in those high places in America are a
bunch of ignorant dummies with bad intentions who in the next few years figure
to be especially disposed to indulge in all sorts of follies that Ms Tuchman would
never have wanted to explore.I think
that it definitely comes through that she always would have wished for for
better on the parts of the citizens of Troy, the popes of the Renaissance, the
leaders of 18th century Britain, and those American Presidents of the 1950’s
and ‘60’s, and she only recounted those stories in a sort of elevated despair
peculiar to hindsight but today – I believe -- is susceptible to accuracy in foresight as
well.